btw, I noticed a discrepancy you might be interested in: Some people are claiming that the biological evidence shows women are worse programmers (on average, etc, etc).
But that is absolutely not true. At most, the biological evidence shows that women prefer not to be programmers. However, once they actually choose to become programmers, the evidence shows they are just as good as men (if not better).

Harming? Really? And, no, he did not defame his employer, he simply explained why he thinks that some corporate choices were bad (that is a waste of resources) for the company and for the working force (distorted meritocracy) of said company. Then started the name calling, and that was not his fault.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the First Amendment (and employment at will) works. While you certainly have the freedom to write whatever you want, your private employer is under no obligation to provide you with a pedestal, nor can you cry "free speech" to protect against the consequences of that speech. Google had to fire this fellow because any reasonable person can see this creates a hostile work environment - for which Google would be liable, and also because the whole episode

Can't read past his first insipid table (Left biases, right biases), which is about as insightful as a C- undergrad humanities term paper from a community college student. I didn't know you qualified for a six figure income with that level of "education". What a country!Humans are both inherently cooperative and inherently competitive. Disparities are natural, but justice does not exist in nature. And while some few conservatives might argue that all authority deserves respect, I would argue that many of th

Speaking as someone passionate about social justice, but also someone who spent some formative years around evangelical Christianity in the bible belt, I'm seeing some disturbing parallels:

1. Complete cynicism about the motivations of outsiders: Everyone assumes the worst about the motives of the author of the "anti-diversity document" despite his repeated claims to be a supporter of social justice. The judgment is he must be a terrible sexist because he dares to question the details of the diversity programs at Google.

2. Belief that any questioning of the doctrine must be motivated by sin: the sin in this case being sexism.

3. Belief that all deviations from the one true faith, however slight, are equally evil and warrant expulsion from the tribe, or hellfire, or firing.

Basically discourse on the left about social justice is turning toxic and is mirroring the worst parts of evangelical Christianity. Ironically, Ezra Klein discussed exactly this problem on his podcast two weeks ago just before the Google news broke: https://player.fm/series/the-e... [player.fm]

We should take the advice of his guest and learn to be more tolerant of dissent within our own ranks.

For what it's worth, I don't endorse the content of the "anti-diversity manifesto." What I endorse is his right to say things that might be wrong (THE HORROR) without fear of losing his job for being wrong about something.

That isn't what he said. What he said was a perfect 50/50 split may never be possible because he believed an underrated quality in the lack of diversity is that biological differences between the sexes could discourage women from wanting to get into this field.

We can agree or disagree with that claim (I am skeptical of it) but it's not like he said that women who do choose to get into the field are inherently worse at it or anything. In fact h

This is the kind of bullshit the OP was talking about. Taking his comments out of context and intentionally drawing the wrong conclusion in order to demonize him, or anyone for that matter. You are part of the problem.

This says nothing about whether he is wrong or right, it is saying that anyone that dares deviate from the social norms and group think of any organization they belong to are fired or excommunicated. That is the problem. Assuming the worse and reading that into every comment is the problem. Most often, this intentional misreading is done in order for the reader to further their own political agenda.

Americans are losing their ability to simply disagree without someone getting butt hurt over it. It's rather disgusting how we've become a nation of politically correct pansies.

I voted yes. Not because of his views, which were idiotic, but because of the results of his actions. The Google employee publicly embarrassed his company and generated a shitstorm of bad press for them. A circulated memo is not the way to express one's political views in the workplace (especially views so divisive) and he just learned that the hard way.

Some of the best advice my father gave me was about personal views in the workplace: "You might think something. You might even say something. But, for Hea

The stickier situation is when you write stuff on your personal blog that is controversial and off-message for your employer, and you get fired for that. I think this entire debate would have a different color if he did that, and I'd be far more inclined to support him if he did exactly this, even if I disagree with his screed. I would consider that to be an overstep by his employer, even if his blog mentioned that he was a google engineer.

I would love to be debating that scenario. But mouthing off at work has never served anyone well, whether they are right or wrong, and unless this was literally his job, totally not helpful to his employer and thus worthy of termination if it had bad effects (which it did). Even if it is his job, clearly the reaction suggests he needs to leave.

At no point does he say women are inferior, that women don't have the chops for leadership or IT roles, or that there is some sort of moral failing about women or feminism. Nor does he say that he dislikes women, that there are too many of them in the workplace, or that something needs to be done to reduce their influence at all. He mostly just explains why more women don't want to be in those roles, but doesn't advocate blocking them in any way.

Google is free to hire/fire whomever they wish. If they think his leaked memo embarrassed the company in any way, then they were free to part ways with his company. If I started spreading "trash talk" about company policies around my company in the form of a manifesto, then I'd expect to be fired or otherwise disciplined.

1) As groups, women and men have various qualities that differ on average.2) There is plenty of reason to believe those differences could affect average interests and aptitudes that result in sex disparities in the work place.3) There is plenty of reason to believe that there's plenty of fundamentally dogmatic and wrong-headed efforts to force an artificial 50/50 representation of the sexes in various careers.4) Saying any of the above unless you're in a sexist environment will end up getting you fired.

Maybe he was wrong on some or even the majority of his stated opinions, but not on the underlying basis. And sure enough, rather than debate him he's vilified, his arguments ignored.

Having said that... dumbass move posting that within Google, even in a supposedly 'open' environment. I've lived through a couple of PC purge eras so far... once the nutbars are allowed to have control, it takes a long time to restore sanity and it's made more difficult by the opposition nutbars who really do need to be shut down for poisoning their workplace with sexism/racism/whateverism.

And yeah, when you get a place like that... if you're white you're presumed racist and if you're male you're presumed sexist, so you get Affirmative Action (forcing hiring quotas which, yes, involves lowering standards for the targeted groups). And that results in inferior hires who support pre-existing prejudices and leaves qualified members of those groups working under suspicion of being unqualified diversity hires... and silent resentment from those losing opportunities to others who are presumed to be less qualified.

It's poison, and Google is paying a price for it even if they don't realize it.

It strikes me as strange that we cannot even have a science based conversation about the differences between Left and Right, or Men and Women, without the SJW Religious Police calling for someone's head.

He is in opposition to the company's values and argues to exclude over half the human population from his profession. He gives conservatives a bad name. His language implies that women tend to be neurotic. He doesn't show any argument about what makes a good software engineer. His arguments are based on how he views the software development environment that was built in the testosterone laden past. He seems irrational and will be resistant to changing his viewpoint.
Because he holds these views so strongly, it would be a risk to put him into a role where his views would affect his judgment to the detriment of Google's goals. He can't be promoted to leadership of a team or management. He can't mentor an engineer of either gender. He can't be on an interview team. His usefulness to Google is diminished.
I vote he leave Google peaceably or be terminated at will.
I speak as a female software engineer with 36 years of experience in a number of domains including printer firmware, CIM, business applications, mobile applications and mostly backend server software. I have a BSCS and MSSE earned the hard way. I have led teams and managed them as well but my first love is software development. I have experienced the bro culture first hand over the decades - this is tiresome and a waste of energy. The first programmers were women by the way.
The interesting aspect of this situation, for me, is that this memo floated around Google for several weeks with no one in leadership stepping up to address it. It wasn't until it was leaked to the public that there is all this reaction. Why?

Well, the "Why?" is the easy part -- because if they'd fired him they risked either him leaking the memo, or it becoming public as part of a wrongful termination suit; those costs you stated paled in comparison. It wasn't until they were sunk that Google had nothing to lose from firing him.

No he didn't He was rather shortsighted in his actions, as I'm not sure anyone thought this would play out different than it didn't. But basically, he is lashing out at the status quo that: If (women_in_workplace 50%) { sexism = true } formula that seems to be the metric.

He does NOT "argue to exclude over half the human population from his profession." At NO POINT does he say anything even remotely like that.

He does attempt to explain why more women don't want to be in his profession. Direct quote: " I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."

At no point in the entire document does he even hint that women should avoid leadership or tech, nor that the company should shun women or scrutinize them more during interviews or anything at all like that. This attitude simply is not there.

Another quote: "I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)."

He agrees with you! And here you are making false statements about what he wrote and judging him based on those false statements.

See for yourself [pastebin.com]. You are judging him based on lies other people have said about what he wrote.

Also, he doesn't "imply" that women tend to be neurotic, he states it here: "Women, on average, have more:... Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)." He is stating that as a biologist, not as an accuser. He doesn't use that to justify treating women different, but to explain why women act differently. Everyone is going ape-shit over this statement...but it just doesn't mean what they say it means. And anyway it's true, the stats prove it [adaa.org].

I like that people keep posting this, but the most outraged people aren't reading anything but headlines, and I think the repetition of said headlines will stifle reality like it usually does.

I was outraged at the headline, and then when I read the document, it was obvious that a lot of bias had been inserted into a really sterile observational document that was critical of how Google is handling diversity.

I'm proudly liberal, and I can't find a lot to disagree with in the doc. I think people are reading in

"His language implies that women tend to be neurotic" - probably because neuroticism is a dimension within Big 5 personality traits system, it is a tendency to experience negative emotions, and is statistically more pronounced in women. Same as his argument about "agreeableness".

"He gives conservatives a bad name" - he explicitly says that companies need a mix of liberals and conservatives (and their traits) to be healthy.

Depressive disorders account for close to 41.9% of the disability from neuropsychiatric disorders among women compared to 29.3% among men.Leading mental health problems of the older adults are depression, organic brain syndromes and dementias. A majority are women.

About 1 in 4 women are taking medication for mental illness compared to 15% of men.

I have experienced the bro culture first hand over the decades - this is tiresome and a waste of energy.

It's astonishing to me that remarks like those are made routinely by feminists. I have heard remarks about "bro culture" many times now. Isn't that a stereotyping remark? Frankly, remarks like those are far more extreme than any stereotyping behavior I have ever seen at any startup, and I've been doing this a long time, as you have.

Ann, did you understand what you just read? I didn't say that sexism was non-existent at companies. I said that making remarks or writing screeds about "bro culture" in the tech field is even more stereotyping and worse than any sexism at companies I have observed.

Your response to that is simply to repeat the inflammatory remarks which were just pointed out to you?

Not to be offensive, but I very much dislike judgement not based on source. Your argument has a few flaws based on the source memo [documentcloud.org].

He is in opposition to the company's values and argues to exclude over half the human population from his profession.

He didn't say to exclude half the human population. He did say that "I hope it’s clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair" and "I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I

He is in opposition to the company's values and argues to exclude over half the human population from his profession.

He said absolutely no such thing, you're putting words in his mouth.

He argues that there may be biological reasons why more men are interested in programming computers than women (and the corollary that there may be biological reasons why women prefer certain work that men don't). And that if you just assume it's due to sexism then you'll never find the root cause to address. Maybe try reading the actual memo?

I voted "Other", because I have no idea whether or not his firing was justified. I don't have nearly enough information to be able to gauge that (and neither does anyone else who isn't party to the whole thing).

"Hal: Witch hunts are a well-known cultural problem at Google. The company is currently facing a Federal complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board in April for interfering with employees’ legal right to discuss “workplace diversity and social justice initiatives.” The complaint alleges that Senior Vice President Urs Holzle and numerous managers in his organization actively stoked up witch hunts in 2015 and 2016 intended to muzzle low-level employees who raised concerns about th

It doesn't matter if what he said was true or not. He hurt their feelings so bad that many women who work for Google stayed home on Monday. [npr.org] You can't just let someone who challenges the narrative like that to stay there & be disruptive. I wonder if Google will offer cake & grief counseling?

Human beings deserve respect and corporations are NOT human beings and do NOT deserve respect, and especially not the respect demanded by slave-masters. AKA fear by the indebted wage slaves.

Makes me feel so dated. "Respect for the individual". Ever hear of it? One of the three operative principles of a formerly great company back when corporate principles meant something, before partial capitalism was completely replaced by modern corporate cancerism. Really hard to apply that simple-sounding principle, how

I don't know if we are approaching a moment when intelligent discussion will be forever gone. It certainly seems so, sometimes.

I can say that women run slower than men, and not offend anyone (I'd hope). Everybody is aware of the fact that, even if women run slower than men, in general, most men cannot outrun the women running at the Olympics. That fact does not invalidate the previous one. There we find in the general public a good understanding of distributions, that shows that the concept is not inherentl

Part of his screed was about how people of certain genders or races are statistically less likely to be suitable for work at Google and therefore they shouldn't hire so many people of those races or genders. Seems pretty clear-cut, doesn't it?

My bad, it was gender rather than race that he said that about. Sometimes I get my forms of deplorable bigotry mixed up when I'm in a hurry. I guess it's better to make a bigoted statement against a whole gender than any specific races, right?

RTFM? I've had to read the whole awful thing multiple times by now, and have even seen the lost (ethically irrelevant) citations. Behold, enough smoking guns for a John Woo action scene:

I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

Personality differences

Women, on average, have more:

Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.
Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

That is a '50s-level sexist comment made in the context of recommendations for changes to company hiring practices, not an academic discussion on psychology. I think you'll need to accept that you're somehow immune to passively noticing such statements, and if you wish to be able to notice 5-alarm-fires of bigotry, you'll have to put an active effort into recognizing them on an intellectual level.

Google is being investigated for gender pay inequality (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pay-disparities-women-labor-department-lawsuit). Their response is that Google most definitely does not have this happening.

When someone comes in and tries to explain that it's natural for there to be one ("This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking forraises, speaking up, and leading."), and it leaks to the public, it gives the prosecution some extra evidence

Yes they had every right to fire him. I might have fired him simply because he was the face of the public mess, even though his memo was 100% right.

But: having given this guy the idea that Google had a culture of open inquiry, they pulled the rug out from under him when he crossed an unwritten boundary. No one is entitled to dis their employer in public, but Google fucked him over nevertheless.

And that, of course, doesn't get into the blatant lies and doublespeak out of Pichai, and Brown, and Sandberg, a

At the moment the vote stands at 1484 / 4415 or 33% for firing James Damore. Before voting "no", I thought that this would be the most one sided poll in the Slashdot's history. I am devastated to find that a third of Slashdot's active readership is for James' firing.

I need spell how I interpret this.

First, after reading the memo, I concluded that James presented intelligent, well meaning and well thought argument about a complex topic. I don't think anyone can come to any other conclusion after reading the

Google did exactly the right thing. This guy wrote something that it was obvious would piss off a LOT of people, did it using work resources and work hours and published it anonymously which meant it would be more notorious and there would be a bunch of extra effort spent to find out who wrote it.

If Google had given their tacit approval for this activity by not firing him, it would've opened the door for more people to do the same thing, for investor lawsuits, for boycotts and I'm sure other things that wou

"the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes" isn't right, because it's actually due to hubby free benefit!

Seriously, if you have/caught a hubby, why work when you can have free money from your hubby? Why deal with Google, tech, annoying bosses or deadlines when you can go by your days going out, play with the kids and have fun doing yoga? Let's the men enjoy their terrible bosses and stressful days while you take your time planting new roses on the

He made himself unemployable in any normal sense. You don't piss off half the people in your own company and then expect to continue to be employed as normal. All the stuff about free speech doesn't matter to actual, practical employment issues. If half your co-workers hate you then you can't do your job, you're just not a cost effective employee.

That being said, since free speech is legally protected they were stupid to fire him straight away. Doing so just kept the story in the news and brought up lega

Suppose you're at a code review meeting. Would you just say, "There's a major error in the code", and leave it at that? Or would you be specific and say, "Line 50 is "int arrayIndex = 1;"The index should be initialized to zero, not to one."? You would tell exactly what was wrong with the code, right?

I've read a lot of criticisms of Damore's essay. The criticisms claim that the essay says that women aren't suited for IT work, or that the essay created a hostile work environment, or something like that. Howev

To give you one short example, "Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social sciences lean left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap", which I think you'll agree contains the implied statement [the gender gap is a myth]. In the footnote it says that the well known numbers are a result of bad averaging, but "For the same work though, women get paid just as much as

I agree that your first quote implies that the gender gap is a myth. However I don't think that that statement, or the statement "For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men" could cause Google serious harm, but I might be wrong. And I appreciate your well-reasoned argument.

Googles actions made clear they were insensitive to the tone and misread the message, were unable to properly handle this with an eye on image due to their echo chamber ideas. That shows part of who google are.

Diversity is a big problem today as it was in the past. diversity acknowledges that people are different, but equal in rights and should be treated equally. Unfortunately, we do not do that. Sometimes we try to fight our own prejudgments, but often we not even know we have them. This has in part to do with our ability (and its application) to question ourselves and reflect on our behavior. On top of that we have societal structures which limit and prohibit equal chance and equal respect for everyone (these

The question was "should," not "could." Rights define what you can do, not necessarily what you should do. Yes, they were well within their rights. But no, they probably shouldn't and wouldn't have fired him if this had remained internal. Unfortunately, that decision wasn't left up to them, because somebody violated confidentiality and leaked this to the press. Under public fire, Google was forced to fire the employee to save face, and nobody can blame them for that. But what they should do is hunt down tha

That still doesn't change the fact that Google is 100% within their rights to fire him.

Actually, I suspect that a team of lawyers are going to be arguing about that very soon. While California is "at will," in addition to those protected classes, employers are not allowed to fire employees for their political views or discussing how to improve their work environment, which Damore's opinions fall under.

Google is a publicly traded company, incorporated in the United States and subject to its laws and the whims of its board of directors. China is a sovereign nation that answers to nobody. One chooses an employer, citizenship is forced. Comparing these two is bizarre.

He himself acknowledges that he is aware of his employers views and rules. He ran against the grain and got fired. That's employment in a nutshell.

Google is a publicly traded company, incorporated in the United States and subject to its laws and the whims of its board of directors. China is a sovereign nation that answers to nobody. One chooses an employer, citizenship is forced. Comparing these two is bizarre.

Google does business in China, and people can change their citizenship.

Its not the fault of the SJW's that they get mad at criticisms, so surely it isn't their fault that they get very angry at criticisms that include citations to indisputable peer reviewed science like he did.

There's some confusion between what's acceptable at work and what's acceptable in the public. It's happens a lot, not strictly in technology. You don't spread this stuff around your office, even if it is 100% undeniable truth, and in this case there's a lot of speculation and narrative very loosely backed up by cherry picked facts and uncontrolled anecdotal "experiments". Even amongst scientists this "theory" would probably be resisted strongly and carry a very significant burden of proof, and it certainly wasn't written as any academic effort.

There's no science to be had on this topic, every attempt to apply scientific principles to behavior at the individual or group level has been tried for over a hundred years and produced absolutely nothing of value. With that said, we then have to choose the direction we want for the society we want. In the west, this implies gender and racial equality. This is the prevailing belief, it is widespread, generally accepted and, I'd be willing to bet, part of his yearly business conduct training at Google (as it is at every employer I've ever had).

If James Damore, misogynist, gets persecuted by the government or even the local rabble, I'm more inclined to defend him even if I don't like his ideas. But James Damore, Google Engineer, fired for mouthing off at work is not defensible. I don't care if the prevailing belief at Google is that the earth is the center of the universe, and he's the one guy screaming that it's not true, he's being disruptive. He has to choose whether his job or his beliefs are more important to him, and in the case where he cannot do his job because of his beliefs, he needs to leave anyway (see also crazy government clerk who won't issue marriage certificates for gay marriages).

What in there was misogynistic? Saying that, on average, men and women have different interests doesn't imply those are worse. He went out of his way several times to say that we should treat people on an individual basis, despite what the group average might lead us to believe. But denying the group average doesn't help either.

Evo-psych is actually getting pretty good at designing and conducting reasonably well-controlled experiments. You might want to brush up on it a little more. This [evolution-institute.org] is a good startin

The link I included directly counters, and indeed cites many studies, counteracting the claim that most research finds only physical differences between men and women. There's plenty of evidence out there, and a lot of valid scientific criticism of the studies claiming no differences.

With that said, we then have to choose the direction we want for the society we want. In the west, this implies gender and racial equality.

Equality does not mean capability.

Ask 100 men and 100 women to bench press 60kg. That's equality, giving the same chance to both.

More men are going to be capable to bench press that weight than women. Some men will fail, some women will succeed but the percentages of success on both sides will be vastly different. That's capability (and reality), not everyone is created

No. In your example, the distribution of capability difference is defined by gender. Individual inequality is not. This is actually an important and meaningful distinction.

It's also important to note that an observed gender based difference in capability distribution may not necessarily be a result of biology. In the example at hand (computer programming?), the preponderance of current evidence indicates that it isn't.

Respectfully, there is a ton of science on this topic. All you need to do is look at brain scans of girls vs boys as they are doing routine tasks. Girls brains light up on both hemispheres for language for example. Boys, only the left. Girls largely make use of white matter in the brain, boys gray. See: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]

“These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,”

Labeling someone as a misogynist by your definition would mean every scientist analyzing the differences between human male and females, would by extension, be a misogynist.
You've become anti-science without even realizing it.

Left politics has dominated tech since before I was born. That battle was "lost" long ago, and since I showed up to work on my first day I've learned that there are some topics I need to not discuss. It's really easy, every year they drill in to us what those are and from his own memo, he knows all this to be true. He does not agree, but that's not the proper forum, and honestly not a battle that can be won. That last point is something that bites the young a lot, and it's annoying, but it's like arguing th

In every tech company I worked with the CEO and most of the executives were Wall St. shills that had very little involvement with the employees of his company, or at least was mostly unable to reach or impact them. They hung out for a few years and were replaced. In the one case where the CEO was there for a long time, he is very, very liberal.

Tech CEOs are focused on money and keeping wall st. happy, the manage up, they find ways of selling what we make for them. Their gums flap a lot but rarely are able t

not sure why this got modded down into the negative numbers, so I quoted the important part.

He wasn't fired for holding beliefs... He was shit canned for writing up a stupid document espousing those beliefs and spreading it around his place of business. Whether you agree or disagree with what he had to say (and I disagree strenuously, having worked in the industry for almost 20 years), his employer has the final say to his employment status... Especially in an at will employment state.

I don't know why, but I was expecting better from the next generation of engineers.

He got fired for going public with stuff the female engineers fear the guys are saying in private anyway. His first point, that his other points should be addressed in the open has some merit. But, his other points were presented in a long crazy sexist rant that did not help the debate. Men and women are different, but so are men and men and women and women. Much of what he says applied to some women and some men

I think you didn't read it, or you would be agreeing with him. He went out of his way to say that we should treat people as individuals, but that we shouldn't necessarily expect equal distributions within every field because there are some differences in the group averages. There are plenty of great female engineers, but fewer women want to be engineers. He even acknowledged that discrimination is probably partly to blame!

It is a Right to Work state (surprisingly, given how left they are overall) but they do have some protections in place that may have covered him - political stances are covered. In addition, federal law prohibits firing people over discussing workplace conditions, and a good lawyer could maybe build a case on that. Either way, even if they had the legal right to do it, I don't think they did the right thing by doing so.